VMware flicks switch on Euro hybrid cloud

As foreshadowed in these very pages last week VMware has flicked the switch on its VMware Hybrid vCloud Service in Europe.

Virtzilla's being a little bit odd in its announcement of the service's genera availability, which says the service will be delivered “... from a data center in Slough, UK. Complementing VMware's existing US data centers, the Slough data center provides customers with a European location that addresses UK and EU compliance and data sovereignty demands.” The company has previously been rather less candid about the location of its kit, last year naming Savvis as its partner in Europe and beyond. Savvis has since renamed itself CenturyLink Technology Solutions, but still publicises its Slough site and offers a detailed description (PDF) of its capabilities.

Let's move on from such quibbling. VMware says the new centre is fully-redundant, offers “flash-accelerated disk storage, 10G networking and congestion control” and even throws in “At no extra cost … a rich set of load balancers, firewalls and VPNs using virtual networks, switches and routers” that replicate customers' physical networking configuration.

All, of course, manageable from within on-premises vSphere as if it were sitting in the very next room.

VMware is up-front about its ambition for the VCHS service inasmuch as it does not see itself in direct competition with big public cloud providers. Instead, it believes that highly-regulated industries want a far more nuanced environment. Now that it's in Slough Europe, local outfits can put that idea to the test.

Updated VMware has contacted us to say that CenturyLink Technology Solutions is not the UK data centre partner, the service will be hosted by Equinix, and another will be signed up shortly. ®